Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Furthermore, Beauregard arranged his attackers in a formation that jeopardized commanders’ control of their units. Each of the four corps—under Major Generals William J. Hardee, Leonidas Polk, Bragg, and Breckinridge—was directed to spread out across the entire three-mile front. Bragg’s would be 1,000 yards behind Hardee’s, and Polk’s 800 yards behind Bragg’s, trailed by Breckinridge’s reserves. Hardee’s 13,228-man Army of Central Kentucky was divided roughly in half, with 6,439 of its personnel transferred to Breckinridge. Bragg’s numbers were 13,589; Polk had 9,136.5

  The Federals had arranged their Pittsburg Landing camps more for offense and comfort than defense. Some extended north to south, facing west, to facilitate formation into columns for the anticipated march toward Corinth. Some camped near the best water source. So they spread out willy-nilly, bounded on three sides by flooded streams—the wide Tennessee River to the east and northeast, Owl Creek to the northwest, and Lick Creek to the southeast. The Confederates, approaching from the only open side, hoped the Federals had essentially trapped themselves in a three-walled box.

  The Confederates intended to drive Grant back onto Owl Creek. That would push him away from the protection of his Tennessee River gunboats, his sources of resupply, and all possibility of aid from an arriving Buell. Somehow, Beauregard’s plan diverged from that intention. To shove the Federals back onto Owl Creek, the attack formation should have been overbalanced to the Confederate right, to separate Grant from the river and his base. Instead, arranging troops equally across the front, as Beauregard did, seemed designed to drive Grant backward into the river.6

  The Confederate trek to Pittsburg Landing was a nightmare. The rain-soaked roads were bad enough, but Beauregard’s precise, impractical orders as to logistics and which troops should proceed first through the intersection of the Ridge and Bark Roads made things worse. The army and its artillery and wagon trains ended up taking three days to traverse the nineteen miles to the battlefield. And the first line of attackers, Hardee’s corps, got into position more than a half day before the rest of the army. Thousands of young, half-disciplined Confederates had to idle away hours within earshot of the Union picket lines.

  Keeping thousands of volunteers quiet as time dragged on proved impossible. They engaged in rowdy outbursts and pulled triggers to see if their weapons would fire in the dampness. Through the night of April 5, Union bands serenaded their fitful slumbers. Federal discovery of their presence seemed certain. In fact, it appeared to happen time and again. Most notable, of course, was the prolonged skirmish that brought Grant out on the hellish night of April 4. As Hardee reported from near the infamous crossroads to Chief of Staff Bragg,GENERAL: The cavalry and infantry of the enemy attacked Colonel [James] Clanton’s regiment, which was posted, as I before informed you, about 500 or 600 yards in advance of my lines. Colonel Clanton retired, and the enemy’s cavalry followed until they came near our infantry and artillery, when they were gallantly repulsed with slight loss.7

  Confederates captured some members of the Seventy-second Ohio detachment, and their disappearance brought more Union infantry and cavalry hurrying to the scene. Ohio major Leroy Crockett’s eyes widened as Confederates conducted him to the crossroads where Hardee’s camp was located.

  “Why, you seem to have an army here,” Crockett said wonderingly.8

  Thanks to the unforeseen difficulties of the march to Pittsburg Landing, the Confederate attack, originally scheduled for Friday, April 4, was postponed to Saturday, then Sunday.

  The excitable Beauregard became frantic. Surprise was essential to his plan; yet, the two armies were practically on top of each other. Hearing bands playing and bugles blowing, he sent orders to have the racket shushed. His courier returned with news that this could not be done; Federals were making the racket. Assuming that the delays had cost his Confederates the advantage, Beauregard demanded the attack be scrubbed. The likelihood that the Union army would be ready for them was not the only difficulty. Their three days’rations had been consumed on the march. Hunger loomed so darkly that, when General Hardee wrote his report, he remembered lack of rations as the sole problem.9

  About 4 p.m. on April 5, Johnston finally reasserted his authority over Beauregard. The attack would not be cancelled, he said. He hardly needed to voice his reason. The Confederates could not back away again after seven weeks of retreating and consolidating for the announced purpose of striking an all-out blow. The psychological effect on their new nation would be devastating.10

  GENERAL ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON

  A withdrawal now would be even more damaging to Johnston himself.He had breasted public rage for seven weeks. The abuse that would follow another retreat without a fight would humiliate him beyond endurance. On April 3, he had issued a proclamation to the recently dubbed Army of the Mississippi that began, “I have put you in motion to offer battle to the invaders of your country. With the resolution and disciplined valor becoming men fighting, as you are, for all worth living or dying for, you can but march to a decisive victory over the agrarian mercenaries sent to subjugate you and despoil you of your liberties, property, and honor.” He went on to note that soldiers of his army were “expected to show yourselves worthy of your race and lineage,” as well as of “the women of the South.” It closed with the promise that “your general will lead you confidently to the combat.” Johnston had invested everything in the assault on Pittsburg Landing. There could be no going back.11

  But the Confederate generals were still second-guessing the attack plan when predawn firing broke out in a field two miles west-southwest of Pittsburg. Johnston seemed relieved. “The battle has opened, gentlemen,” he told the others. “It is too late to change our dispositions.”12

  One thing worried him, though. The Confederate delay might have allowed Buell to arrive in time to support Grant. And if Buell crossed the Tennessee River farther south at Hamburg Landing, he could come up the Hamburg-Savannah Road, ford shallow Lick Creek, and strike the Confederate attackers in their vulnerable right flank. To guard against that, Johnston sent five more infantry companies, led by Colonel George Maney of the First Tennessee, hurrying to Lick Creek to join the defenders already assigned there: a Tennessee rifle regiment and Forrest’s cavalry.13

  With the Confederate lookouts on the right reinforced, Johnston turned back toward the front. At the left-center of the intended battlefield, in Sherman’s camps, stood Shiloh Church, an unimposing Methodist meetinghouse that an Ohio colonel wrongly judged to “belong to Baptists of the hard shell persuasion.” Toward and to the right of this rough-hewn chapel, the wide waves of Johnston’s Confederate tide—44,699 men, counting cavalry and artillery—finally began spilling forward en masse onto Grant’s 41,330 Federals around Pittsburg Landing. It was 6:30 a.m.14

  4

  APRIL 6, FORENOON—GRANT

  “I Think It’s at Pittsburg”

  Ever after, Grant and Sherman would insist it was no surprise. For the rest of their lives, they would point to the continual skirmishes with Confederate units for days beforehand as proof that they had seen the attack coming. They would add, with similar truth, that they made defensive adjustments almost up to the moment it began.1

  But their Federals had not entrenched. To have done so would have bucked the judgment of General Charles Ferguson Smith, Grant’s mentor-friend and one of the top officers of the prewar army. Gruff old Smith had scoffed at fortifying. Attack, indeed; he growled that he only wished the Confederates would. He may even have meant to invite them to. Before Grant arrived, Smith had planned to order Sherman’s and Lew Wallace’s divisions to that vulnerable west bank of the Tennessee, where the Corinth-congregating Confederates could get at them without having to cross the river. So Grant had gone ahead and ordered them there. “We can whip them to hell,” Smith said.2

  Sherman chose the Pittsburg Landing campsite for another credible reason that Smith doubtless considered. In this spring flood season, much of the ground along the Tennessee was inunda
ted, but the road up from Pittsburg Landing rose onto a low, broad plateau that was comparatively dry and well drained.

  Brigadier Bull Nelson’s hard-marching division of Don Carlos Buell’s army arrived at Grant’s headquarters in Savannah, on the river’s east side, on April 5. His mind on the offensive, Grant rebuffed Nelson’s anxiety and directed him to bivouac on the east bank for a couple of days. Boats to ferry Nelson’s men down to Hamburg Landing were scarce, he explained. No need to hurry.3

  Despite Smith’s cockiness, Grant had shown some intent to follow Major General Henry Halleck’s cautionary directives. He ordered his chief engineer, Lieutenant Colonel James B. McPherson, to mark out a trench line at Pittsburg Landing. But when it turned out to run behind some bivouacs already established near water, Grant did not order the sites changed.

  Other adjustments may have been in abeyance pending the arrival of Buell and Halleck. Halleck had ordered Grant to bring on no battle, so Grant and his division commanders ignored the increasing Confederate provocations. And more permanent fortifications were not thrown up, most likely, because doing so ran contrary to Grant’s aggressive nature. He expected to move toward Corinth as soon as Halleck arrived.4

  Thus, most of Grant’s and Sherman’s reasons for their professed lack of surprise were intellectually dishonest. They correctly maintained that the sight of Confederates at Pittsburg Landing on April 6 was not unexpected. The sight of so many, however, was.

  Many Federal officers and men did not share the Smith-Grant confidence. Several subordinate Union colonels were as convinced that they were about to be attacked as Sherman claimed to doubt it.

  Sherman scoffed at their concerns. The Confederates would never come out of their fortified base and attack the Federals in theirs, he asserted, echoing Grant and Smith. Getting angry, he went out of his way to humiliate the nervous colonels, telling one to “take your damn regiment back to Ohio” and court-martialing another. He insisted that the parties of Confederates were just reconnoitering.5

  Union pickets sensed otherwise. Since April 3, they had seen growing numbers of enemy cavalry watching them from behind trees and bushes. Colonel Everett Peabody, brigade commander in the division to the left front of Sherman’s, disobeyed an order from Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss. Prentiss had told some Peabody pickets to pull back and not to be alarmed by the sound of widespread movements in the woods around them after dark on the night of April 5. Before dawn on April 6, Peabody sent out five companies to try to capture and interrogate some of the “prowling” Confederates.6

  BATTLE OF SHILOH

  The party soon encountered the enemy. They traded volleys for an hour, but the Confederates were so numerous that the Federals pulled back, dragging dead and wounded, as day dawned. Prentiss meanwhile heard heavy firing growing louder and ordered his division into line, then hurried it a quarter mile forward. There, at about 6:30 a.m., just after meeting his retiring pickets, he ran head-on into the center of Albert Sidney Johnston’s army.

  Confederates and Federals began firing as fast as they could reload, but Prentiss was overmatched. Colonel Francis T. Quinn of the Twelfth Michigan Infantry saw an enemy line in his front stretching right and left, “and every hill-top” behind that line “was covered with them.” The sight was more than daunting.7

  Prentiss’s men, new to combat, retreated to their camp, then through it. Dodging between tents, they lost formation, as well as many of their number, some falling to Confederate fire and more sprinting for the rear.

  At about 7 a.m., Sherman, still skeptical, rode toward the increasing clamor. He was looking through his binoculars and deciding that this was indeed a sharp skirmish when Confederates burst from the undergrowth to his right and shot an aide dead beside him. Belatedly, he realized—and shouted—the truth: “We are attacked!” He threw up his right hand to shield himself and took a shot in it. Ordering Colonel Jesse Appler of the Fifty-third Ohio to stand his ground, Sherman galloped off for reinforcements.

  Appler was the officer Sherman had told the day before to take his regiment back to Ohio. He now appeared eager to comply. Under assault by the Sixth Mississippi, Appler went to pieces. His troops were so decimating the Mississippians with cannon and musket fire that only a minority of the Sixth’s 425 men remained unhurt, but Appler suddenly shouted, “Retreat and save yourselves.” The Fifty-third Ohio broke and fled in disorder through the Fifty-seventh, which Sherman had just sent to Appler’s aid. Some of the Fifty-third rallied and stayed on the field, along with—briefly—Appler. But soon, dismayed by his officers’ refusal to obey his fearful commands, he fled.8

  Despite Appler’s personal skedaddle, the Ohioans drew a lot of blood. The Fifty-third and Fifty-seventh had managed to mangle two regiments commanded by Colonel Patrick R. Cleburne, the Irish immigrant and foster Arkansan destined to become perhaps the hardest-fighting infantry commander in the western Confederate armies. The bloodshed seems to have been overwhelmingly in the Ohioans’ favor. Sherman later claimed Appler’s line broke after losing but two enlisted men and no officers.9

  William T. Sherman had some excellent traits—high intelligence in particular—but a placid, steady nature was not one of them. This perhaps owed to his boyhood experience of his father’s death, which shattered his world and thrust him into a foster family. That wrenching experience was reinforced in adulthood by a number of life’s capricious twists of fate. He often seemed to lack self-confidence and, as if trying to shore it up, overcompensated with boisterous, often outrageous talk. His contemptuous dismissal of the threat of Confederate attack at Shiloh was typical.

  In private, Sherman may not have been so sure there was no danger. His professed skepticism was perhaps a desperate attempt to quell his own growing apprehensions. Although he had spent thirteen years in the army, he had seen no antebellum combat. The Seminole War in Florida had been a simmering thing that afforded him no opportunity to bleed, shed blood, or experience battle, and during the Mexican War, he had served in California, even farther from the fighting.10

  Once this new and much larger war began, though, Sherman showed that fear of losing his own life was not his problem. He had led men in combat at Bull Run, was grazed twice by bullets there, and had a horse killed under him. He trembled only for his country. He had long doubted the national will to reunite the states, as well as his—or anybody else’s—capacity to do anything about the looming cataclysm. His problem was more one of ambivalence than fear. Although Southerners would come to hate his name, he felt affection for them. He despised abolitionists for tearing the nation apart, shared Dixie society’s extreme racial animus, and thought Southerners and the South all but impossible to defeat.

  Yet, he remained unionist to the bone. At the advent of secession, he had been in the second year of his prewar life’s most fulfilling job as inaugural superintendent of the future Louisiana State University. But when Louisiana troops took over the Federal arsenal in Baton Rouge, he resigned. He felt beholden to the Union for his West Point education.11

  Sherman had brought a division of “perfectly new” volunteers, as he called them, to these camps around Shiloh Church, and he had seen little in this war to assure him of their competence. He had watched mobs of volunteers flee the Confederate guns at Bull Run. Given command in the state of Kentucky, he had insisted he needed 200,000 such volunteers to prevent Confederates from overrunning the whole Midwest. The figure seemed huge so early in the war. When, as a result, newspaper headlines pronounced him insane, he requested to be relieved of the Kentucky assignment and was granted transfer. That bitter memory influenced him in the run-up to Shiloh. If he agreed with his fearful colonels, he told someone on April 5, “they’d say I was crazy again.”

  Nobody could call him that, though, when he agreed with the colonels the next morning.12

  Around 7 a.m. the Confederates overran the Union camps “yipping and yelping,” as one Federal remembered. Many of the erstwhile campers bolted. The hundreds of fugitives beg
an a gradual exodus that would swell into the thousands as many fled as far as they could without drowning: to and under the overhanging banks of the Tennessee River.13

  Grant’s unreadiness for a wholesale assault did not stem from lassitude. For three weeks he had pushed to visit on the Confederates what they had come here to visit on him: destruction. While gathering intelligence about the Southerners massing at Corinth, he had dispatched an aide, Captain W. S. Hillyer, to St. Louis to beseech Halleck to let him assail Johnston’s army before it was ready. Just that morning, April 6, Hillyer had returned. Grant’s plea had been rejected out of hand. Bring on no battle, Halleck reiterated.14

  Now, over an early breakfast at Savannah, Grant heard the fighting nine miles away. He had been awaiting Buell’s arrival for a talk; otherwise, he would have left already for Pittsburg Landing, where he had planned to move his headquarters that day. On April 4, he had received word that the Senate had confirmed two of his subordinates, John McClernand and Lew Wallace, as major generals. That would make the grasping McClernand the ranking officer at Pittsburg Landing, surpassing Sherman, unless Grant went there himself. So Grant decided to do that. Buell, sulky as when he and Grant had met in Nashville in late February, had arrived in Savannah the previous evening, April 5. But he did not inform Grant, indicating continuing reluctance to coopperate.15

  Buell had still not reported in when, a few minutes past 7:00, everybody at Grant’s breakfast table lapsed into silence at the alarming sound coming from the southwest. Chief of Staff Joseph D. Webster stated the obvious. “That’s firing.” An orderly rushed in and said the sound was coming from upriver. Everybody went to the door. “ Where is it?” Webster asked. “At Crump’s or Pittsburg?”